intelligence and will. It is not mere noise, it is sound instinct with
mind, and articulated by intelligent purpose. By a man's word you could
perfectly know him, even though you were blind and could never see him.
Sight or touch could give you but little fuller information regarding
his character if you had listened to his word. His word is his character
in expression.

Similarly, the Word of God is God's power, intelligence, and will in
expression; not dormant and potential only, but in active exercise.
God's Word is His will going forth with creative energy, and
communicating life from God, the Source of life and being. "Without Him
was not any thing made that was made." He was prior to all created
things and Himself with God, and God. He is God coming into relation
with other things, revealing Himself, manifesting Himself, communicating
Himself. The world is not itself God; things created are not God, but
the intelligence and will that brought them into being, and which now
sustain and regulate them, these are God. And between the works we see
and the God who is past finding out, there is the Word, One who from
eternity has been with God, the medium of the first utterance of God's
mind and the first forthputting of His power; as close to the inmost
nature of God, and as truly uttering that nature, as our word is close
to and utters our thought, _capable of being used by no one besides, but
by ourselves only_.

It is apparent, then, why John chooses this title to designate Christ in
His pre-existent life. No other title brings out so clearly the
identification of Christ with God, and the function of Christ to reveal
God. It was a term which made the transition easy from Jewish Monotheism
to Christian Trinitarianism. Being already used by the strictest
Monotheists to denote a spiritual intermediary between God and the
world, it is chosen by John as the appropriate title of Him through whom
all revelation of God in the past has been mediated, and who has at
length finished revelation in the person of Jesus Christ. The term
itself does not explicitly affirm personality; but what it helps us to
understand is, that this same Being, the Word, who manifested and
uttered God in creation, reveals Him now in humanity. John wishes to
bring the incarnation and the new spiritual world it produced into line
with the creation and God's original purpose therein. He wishes to show
us that this greatest manifestation of God is not